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In the Review’s April 23 issue, Trevor Jackson writes about the state of retirement in America:

Of Americans aged 62–70, only 10 percent are retired and financially stable. Another 11 percent could retire comfortably but choose not to. A full 51 percent are retired, but their living standards have diminished significantly since they stopped working, and 28 percent are still working and cannot afford to stop.… Policy elites and other economists…believe that the solution is for those 79 percent of older Americans who cannot retire comfortably to work longer and retire later.

This is a far cry from the vision of the Social Security Act, which, Jackson notes, quoting the historian James Chappel, is “the greatest poverty-reduction program in American history.” But the kinds of policies necessary to reverse the trend toward ceaseless work—increasing minimum wage, lowering the qualifying age for Medicare—depend “on a set of political conditions that themselves require a powerful, organized, militant working class able to confront and defeat capital, corporations, and employers.” In the meantime, the Trump administration is encouraging retirement plan administrators to invest in cryptocurrency.

Below, alongside Jackson’s essay, are five articles and one letter from our archives about retirement.

Trevor Jackson
The Aging Class

Retirement, like so much of the American economy, is a broken system that benefits private interests and exploits the most vulnerable people.

Caitlin Zaloom
The Broken Promise of Retirement

“Pensions represent more than their economic value. They carry a powerful moral recognition: workers deserve financial stability and the freedom it brings throughout their lives.… For decades, conservative governors and state legislators—sometimes abetted by liberal politicians—have worked to undermine public employee pensions.”

—July 1, 2021

Jeff Madrick
The Specter Haunting Old Age

“By the 1970s, the combination of public and private pensions thus created an extraordinary new situation for many American workers: the prospect of a fairly comfortable old age.… Now,…these gains are just as assuredly being reversed.”

—March 20, 2008

Peter G. Peterson
Social Security: The Coming Crash

Social Security has become the defining link between citizen and state in modern America. It has such uniform and reverential support that if the system crashes, so almost certainly will civic harmony and the economy itself. The prospects for Social Security and for general prosperity are now inseparable.

—December 2, 1982

Peter G. Peterson
The Salvation of Social Security

The real question, therefore, is whether we possess the wit and determination to change our own politics or whether we must wait until chaotic change is forced upon us, including a full-fledged rebellion by young workers, crushed by taxes, against the entire notion of supporting the elderly at a decent level of income.

—December 16, 1982

Rosemary Rinder and Alicia H. Munnell, reply by Peter G. Peterson
The Future of Social Security: An Exchange

Peter Peterson’s obvious good intentions and apparent lack of a “vociferous constituency” have lent his two-part article on Social Security an aura of accuracy and intelligence that it does not deserve. Peterson has overstated the system’s financial problems, has found a link between the expansion of Social Security and the decline in the nation’s productivity that cannot be substantiated, and has used this purported link as a basis for advocating draconian benefit cuts. His analysis and recommendations must not go unchallenged.

—March 17, 1983

V. S. Pritchett
Finite Variety

“Most of us have to face the prospect of a long old age before we die and as we do so we become less than ourselves: we become part of an anonymous and enormous social problem. Unemployment, they say, is bound to increase, retirement comes earlier, economically we become a burden on the state and psychologically a burden on the young and especially on the middle-aged. In the past a man or woman was justly admired, even venerated, for attaining the Biblical three score years and ten and ‘seeing his time out,’ but those ranks were thin. Now they are crowded.”

—November 8, 1979

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